Ribbon-Cutting Celebration for Mount Moran Scheduled Nov. 9

October 31, 2012 — Almost three weeks ago, the National Center for Atmospheric
Science (NCAR) unveiled “Yellowstone”
during a ceremonial opening of the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne. Now, it’s the
University of Wyoming’s turn to celebrate Mount Moran.

UW’s Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC), nicknamed “Mount Moran” after a mountain
peak in western Wyoming’s Teton Range, will be introduced to the campus during
a ribbon-cutting ceremony Friday, Nov. 9, at 4:30 p.m., in the Information
Technology Data Center.

UW President Tom Buchanan will cut the ribbon. UW vice
presidents and the Board of Trustees have been invited to attend, and IBM plans
to send a representative.

“We’ll have a couple of quick speeches, cut the ribbon and
eat cake,” says Tim Kuhfuss, UW’s director of research support for information
technology.

The high-performance computing center has drawn the interest
of roughly 100 UW faculty and researchers to date, Kuhfuss says. During the
week of Oct. 22-26, three researchers used Mount Moran during a free testing
period on the machine. They are:

Dimitri Mavriplis, a UW professor of mechanical
engineering, simulates the aerodynamics of aircraft wings, helicopter
propellers and wind turbines on a computer. Mavriplis works with computational
fluid dynamics (CFD), a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical methods
and algorithms to analyze and solve fluid flow challenges. His scientific
simulations and computer calculations will scale up for use on the NWSC this
fall.

Courtenay Strong, a University of Utah professor
of atmospheric sciences. Strong is helping UW researcher Fred Ogden map a model
of the hydrology of the Colorado River Basin. A comprehensive model of the
upper Colorado River Basin -- at a resolution 100 times higher than currently
available -- will be created. This model will better enable policy and
management decisions regarding water in the basin. The project, like
Mavriplis’s, will make use of the NWSC.

Ogden says UW’s Department of Civil and Architectural
Engineering recently added two new faculty members -- Julian Zhu, an associate professor,
and Noriaka
Ohara, an assistant professor. Zhu, who was a project leader at the
University of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute for eight years, simulates
flow and transport of water, and dissolved constituents through soils and
aquifers. Ohara, who came from the University of California-Davis, is a snow
melt researcher who has conducted field experiments and developed computational
models of snow melt.

“We touted both Mount Moran and Yellowstone when recruiting
both Zhu and Ohara,” Ogden says. “I cannot say if that was the deal-maker for
successfully recruiting them. However, I know it played a part.”

Jeff
Clune, a visiting scientist at Cornell University’s Department of Computer
Science and Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, also used Mount
Moran that week. Clune, who will become a UW faculty member in January 2013, specializes
in evolutionary computation. He models life forms on computers and shows how they
evolve over time, Kuhfuss says.

“He (Clune) said the resources here are exceptional,”
Kuhfuss says.

The campus cluster will serve two purposes. One, it will
enable atmospheric and earth sciences faculty -- who will be able to use the NWSC
-- to learn what to expect with their software. The cluster provides opportunities
for faculty to work out issues caused by scaling up parallel algorithms from
tens or hundreds of processors to thousands of processors, before moving up to
tens of thousands of processors on the NWSC supercomputer.

Two, the cluster will provide a research resource for UW
research faculty -- such as bioinformaticists, social scientists, pure
mathematicians and theoretical physicists
-- whose research doesn’t fall within the scope of the NWSC.

“Right now, a lot of this research is being conducted on
slower clusters or work stations (on campus),” Kuhfuss says. “We’re finding out
Mount Moran is really fast. It’s a lot quicker than we thought.”

Mavriplis already has his own cluster on campus and is eager
to see if he can create a larger cluster with assistance from Mount Moran,
Kuhfuss notes.

Kuhfuss expects Mount Moran to “go live” or be in production
Nov. 1. It will take some time, but Kuhfuss expects ARCC to be a transformative
resource for faculty research on campus and beyond.

“The transformation doesn’t happen until we put all of the
user support in place for training,” Kuhfuss says. “We anticipate recruiting
more faculty members here to use the facility.”

Photo:Mount Moran, the centerpiece of UW’s Advanced Research
Computing Center, will be celebrated with a ribbon-cutting event at 4:30 p.m.
Nov. 9 in the IT Data Center.